Talk of the Toony: The Autobiography of Gregor Townsend. Gregor Townsend
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always our most important fixture of the year, we had won back respect and confidence by the way we had played. However, the one-for-all unity of the amateur era wasn’t in much evidence when I read an article by Craig Chalmers in the Sunday Post the day after the game. He wrote that Scotland would have played much better if he had been selected at stand-off instead of me. It wasn’t the last time that he resorted to the tactic of criticizing his rivals in the media, and I kept his article to give me motivation in our fight for the number 10 jersey. I was determined to do my talking on the pitch, although I was disappointed by the selfish actions of a supposed team-mate.
I kept my place at stand-off for our next match away to Ireland but I knew there were a number of areas in my game that needed to improve; notably kicking, passing off my left hand and tackling. Above all, though, I was disappointed that the Scottish public had yet to see me attacking the opposition with ball in hand, the best part of my game. Now, in my third year of senior rugby, I had learned to stop breaking for the sake of breaking and was responding to situations more as they arose rather than forcing play. However, this had made me somewhat conservative in the match against England, which was probably the first game of my career that I hadn’t managed to break the advantage line at least once.
It is often said that the fear of failure is more stimulating than the reward of success and I’ve heard many coaches and players shout before a game: ‘We’ve got to be scared of losing today!’ I agree that losing sometimes hurts much more than the equivalent feeling when you win, but I don’t think it’s a good way to motivate players. A culture of fear leads to worry and anxiety, which is not a winning attitude. Being positive and concentrating on the process – not the end result – is a much surer route to success. I resolved to be free from worry and tried to express myself much more in Dublin.
We drew with Ireland 6–6 after having dominated the first half, in which we played into the teeth of a howling gale. Gary was monumental at scrum-half, despite playing for most of the game with a broken hand. The match was also my best performance yet for Scotland, as I made a couple of breaks and tackled well. It was our first time for almost a year that we hadn’t suffered a defeat, but we knew that it was the second game in a row that we should have won.
With Gary now injured, I lined up with Bryan Redpath at half-back for our final Five Nations match at home to the French. Although we only had five caps between us, I thought we would work well together. As it turned out, we didn’t have the immediate understanding I had hoped for and my own game was again as frustrating as it had been against England. To cap it all off, I threw an interception pass that gifted France seven points at a stage in the game when we still might have come back to win.
After the match Gavin tried to console me, saying that if my pass had hit its intended target we would have scored a try. The move was a simple miss-one loop, which had achieved its aim of committing the French midfield. With Gavin and Kenny Logan outside me, a clear overlap had presented itself. As we had predicted in our pre-match analysis, Philippe Saint-Andre rushed in from his wing to try and block my pass. Because of my poor execution, plucking the ball from the air was his reward for this ‘blitz’ style of defending, and he ran unopposed all the way to the try-line.
A lack of experience can only go so far in explaining my poor decision at throwing the interception pass. Just as in the England game, I had attempted a pass that I would never have tried in a club match. But when you are not confident in your actions, hope replaces certainty.
Normally, I would have relished the fact that Saint-Andre had come off his wing to pressure my pass. This is an ideal situation in which to hold onto the ball for as long as possible so that the defender has to make a decision as to what to do next. Because I was moving forward, Saint-Andre would have had to come in and tackle me or go out to tackle Gavin. Either way, at least one of our players would have been in space. However, instead of waiting for his actions to make the decision for me, I presented him with an opportunity by trying to pass the ball to Gavin as soon as possible. It was a 50–50 pass, which more often than not is punished at international level. We lost the match 20–12.
I suppose everyone in sport has to navigate a learning curve, but my problems had nothing really to do with either the opposition I was facing or the step up to Test level. The reason I hadn’t played to my potential was entirely to do with my state of mind. Although this was exasperating, I realized that it was probably much easier to remedy than a physical weakness or any problems coping with the speed and intensity of international rugby.
Two years later, Scotland coach Richie Dixon made the wise decision to introduce a sports psychologist, Dr Richard Cox, to work with the team. Dr Cox showed us an example of how the dangers of having doubts about your ability can have a direct affect on your performance. He produced a document that included quotes that were familiar to me. The text was in fact an interview that I had given to the Sunday Times a few weeks after the French game and the gifted Saint-Andre try. Dr Cox described it as an ideal example of the importance of self-belief in sport.
During our internationals at Murrayfield in 1994 I sometimes went for a pass when there would be no way I’d do that in a club game. I went in thinking that I must not make mistakes, but that meant not trying things. I was thinking I would be dropped if I made a mistake. Now, I realize I was thinking wrongly.
Getting over injury problems and trying desperately to balance the expectations of others had made me incredibly frustrated. Worryingly, this had also left me short of confidence. I viewed rugby as a game that I took enjoyment from and I had always tried to play without constraints. I knew I hadn’t been true to myself over the past few months in this regard, and was no longer doing things that had always come naturally to me.
After the Five Nations were over I managed to start taking pleasure in the game once again as I played sevens rugby for Gala. We had a superb group of sevens players – guys like Grant Farquharson, Jim Maitland and Ian Corcoran – and we won the Melrose and Jed Sevens, as well as our own tournament. We very nearly made it four wins out of the five spring tournaments, losing in the final at Langholm. Away from the glare of expectation at Murrayfield, I was smiling on a rugby field once again. I also went to the Hong Kong Sevens for the third time and did my best to enjoy my twenty-first birthday party, which was held in a student pub in Edinburgh.
However, it was whilst playing in the sevens circuit that my injury problems began to get close to unbearable levels. My wrist had been sore during the Five Nations but it was my knee that was more of a worry – it had given me constant pain since the beginning of the year. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to take a break from rugby and I was again trying to fit in as much as possible.
To try and alleviate my knee pain, I adopted an unconventional recovery technique at the suggestion of the sprint coach I’d worked with the previous year, Charlie Russell. He said to me that the best thing I could do was to sit downstream in a river for ten to fifteen minutes after every training session. He said this had worked for a few players, citing as an example Kelso’s Eric Paxton, who had sat in a river after a hamstring tear and had been able to play the following weekend. Ice baths may be common rehabilitation practice nowadays, but this cold-water treatment was almost unheard of back in 1994. Although it wasn’t a pleasant experience, it certainly kept the swelling down a little, and provided some interesting viewing for one surprised Borderer.
For my outdoor ice bath I had been using the Caddon River on the edge of Clovenfords, which was a ten-minute drive from Gala. Late one night after a training session, I drove up there on my own to try to ease the pain in my knee. With my three jerseys and a waterproof jacket I was almost ready to sit in the water for fifteen long minutes. The finishing touch was to place a hot-water bottle under my jerseys to keep my heart warm as I sat down on the riverbed. It was a dark night, and I switched on my Walkman to try and think about something other than my freezing legs. I closed my eyes and hummed along with Kylie Minogue.
After ten minutes of sitting downstream, I thought I heard the noise of a dog barking which I found odd as I’d never heard it before in the song I was listening to. Something made me look around, and I nearly jumped out of the water when I saw a man standing above me on the riverbank. He was pulling back on his dog’s lead, which was excitedly barking at this strange person lying in the river below. There was no